Turnstyle

They come and go and I am the blur as they whisk around like cream being thickened by my blades. I remember names and then they vanish and I am left the only trace, the one that sees them all, maybe not as they are but as they appear before me for the merest glimpse of a personality destined to leave and never return.

Turmoil

I am not sure what to do. The phrase 'have your cake and eat it to' springs to mind. There are so many options, so many vague guesses and mental gesticulations. I like them all in different ways. There is always the promise of something new, the thrill of the unknown is balanced against the fear of what lies unseen in the future.

I am tempted to ignore them all.

I know I won't.

Handshakes

There are so many kinds of handshakes. This one means he is a man. That one means he is afraid. When you do that you are showing off. The one he just tried to do is secret and not meant for prying eyes. This one will let you in. Grip it any harder and I will beat you. You must be gay. I do not trust you. He is strong. You are not.

Shake on it.

Life....

It is speeding along now, days blurring into each other. Any attempt to document everything is futile....it just seeps in and out of my mind, occasionally spilling onto the page

Fade

This is how it goes:

First it's the end of school, then it's work and lovers and then foreign adventures and soul-searching and mid-life crises with kids and partners and divorce and newspapers with silence over breakfast; eggs sunny-side up and black with one sugar please. And, it's 9 to 5 and the morning crew on FM between traffic jams and fantasies about anybody but the person you sleep with and lie to.

Then it begins to fade like a photo thats been leftin the midday sun and dusk is coming, slow but steady, and now we are walking like we're treading in buckets of warm honey and the vision blurs - was that last week or 2002?

Soon it doesn't matter because we don't remember much at all and rest is a short breath between stairs that don't seem to end and now, on the deathbed, preparing to leave at long last, there is a flash - a burst of colour and sound -

It is a face, a friend from school and the two of you are smiling and talking about the future; wondering aloud of God and life while lying back on grass and staring up at the clouds that pass overhead like ghosts from tomorrow that answer all of your questions in between stabs of heat from the sun that hangs up there and will outlast us all.

Wide Awake

I'm here.

I open my eyes and find myself from scratch.

Another day on Earth.

Before I can ask myself if it's worth it I rub my eyes and splash cool water on my face and slam the door and start all over again.

I am wide awake.

White Pointers

I hide behind the smile as best I can, displaying canines and erupting with laughter, winking charm and handshakes, jokes and bravado.

Inside I quake with every interaction, I'm trembling with fear and praying my voice doesn't quaver and betray the me inside, amazed and terrified by the world outside.

I flash my teeth and pretend everything's O.K.

A Million Pairs

Darting arrows - slung from bows, eyes and furrowed brow. I'm hit, no matter how I try to evade them, they strike my shield, my practiced nonchalance, poker face. Down I go, again, bleeding from 2 million wounds, 2 scars for every pair.

Lullabye

I go to bed with my mind full of life. Thoughts cascade through my brain, mixing into each other and sharing their streams, a spiral of the day and the years and forever.

The further I spin into myself the more it the more it all makes sense and none at all, and as I drift I feel things as they should be, not numbers and taxes or break-ups and T.V., but gently perfect patterns, all the universe like the finely detailed geometrical beauty of a Persian rug.

I sink into the rug and feel it yield yet still it holds me as I rest my soul and the remains of the day tear themselves apart and the fragments float like flakes of snow all cool and calm and soft and now I feel the t....

The Dream Merchant

People need something to believe in, whether it's God or the news or the devil, we need something to have faith in, be afraid of, run to. In the same way, people need a dream, a hope for things in the future, a goal or a wish to shoot for.

I have dreams and hope, I wish for things in the future. In some ways, dreams are all we have. Although the past grounds us , tells us who we are and where we've been, , we can't just wallow in history and memories. The present is so flimsy and indefinite, so wafer-thin and elusive, if anything it is less real than the ideas we have for what tomorrow may bring.

Sometimes I think that the only thing keeping people holding on to their fragile lives is the hope that the future will bear fruit, flinging ripe apples to the ground when shaken by time's arrow. When we wake up in the morning and make that decision to get up and confront the day instead of willing ourselves back into a coma, it is the promise of today, the hope for tomorrow that injects our spines with life and carries these brittle bones back out onto the battlefield.

People need something to believe in. Sometimes the powers that be also need the people to believe. The populace needs it's soma, the crowd its cake, the masses their opiate. The proles, us proles, need breadcrumbs thrown before our feet to make sure we head in the right direction. The loaves are baked in stoves and thrown before the feet of those that wait, salivating over a new pair of shoes, a plasma screen, a luxury car.

Our dreams are turned into clay and molded to whet our appetites, when what we really need is sugar but protein. Soon enough even our own lives become the clay we wish to mold, with ab-crunchers and Atkin's diets and silicone implants and teeth whitening; the teething rings for babies lost in dreams.

Prescription Medicine

She is scrawny, strands of dirty blonde hair pulled down straight in a ponytail, flung back over her gaunt skull. She speaks in a muted, mumbled stream, her voice trailing off at points while she stares into the middle-distance, waiting for her thoughts to catch up to her tongue.

She hands me sheets of paper; forms for doctors, forms for medicine. It's an elaborate plan for such a frazzled person. Cutting paper from here and sticking it there, scanning this and copying that. It seems beyond her at first; she's a two finger typist and dulled by whatever is partying in her system.

After an hour of back and forth she is done. Anxious calls over a battered mobile ensue, arrangements are made - appointments pushed back.

I had found myself treating her with mild disdain at first - but as she continued pursuing her goal I relaxed my self-righteous and became empathetic to her cause.

Just before she leaves I hand her one final document, a letter from her psychiatrist. She looks at the page with a sudden focus, jarred from the blanket of dope she is hiding beneath. The woman finds herself staring at a synopsis of her life - distilled to a minimum of symptoms, and the situations that provoked them.

...Borderline personality disorder...acute anxiety disorder....radical surgeries...deaths of siblings...aversion to doctors....death could have been avoided....mental disorders...

She lifts her head from the page - shocked, numb.

"I didn't realise what they'd written. I was so focused on typing it - making sure the spelling was alright - I didn't know what she'd written about me."

I watched her read her life story. It was a pause in the journey - a brief reflection - the knock of reality.

And then she left.

Fire & Ice

Some people are ice. Sub-zero kings and queens, shards of frozen eyes like cubes that hardly melt. One touch in frostbite, a touch of the soul that tears the skin from from fingertips and strips the pink from lips.

And people are fire, white hot light and blurred-blue flame. Spewing heat that draws you in, closer to the core, moths that dance on the glow of a fiery torch, destroyed by love they dream no more.

I need to burn. I need to freeze and fuck and fight. I long to burst into flames and consume the earth, or be burnt and turned to ash by life. If I could freeze I'd die by ice and rest my soul as cold as night.

Speechless

I don't know what I want to say. The words are not here. As much as I try I can't scream from the page, tear the screen or cry with type. I know where the meaning is though; it's in my chest, just below my heart - and it tugs but it's a lump like a ball and chain, it's an anchor that hasn't hit the bottom but sways as it is drawn towards the seabed.

It's at the back of my head, it's a hand rubbing and lightly scratching just behind the ears, but the itch never leaves, it just throbs and whsipers yet I can't quite hear it.

I feel it at the back of my throat, a shout I can't let out - it's my voice but it has nowhere to go.

I guess that's it. It is somewhere but I'm speechless.

The World is the Journey

The guys bustle into the store, jovial and sparkling with fresh energy. They are dressed in traditonal 'Kluft', sturdy black vests over white shirts, well used black top hats and rustic black boots. Settling down to surf the net, they are here to chill a little before the next leg of the journey.

They are on a traditional pilgrimage, a coming of age ritual dating back to the middle-ages. Once they leave their home-towns, they are forbidden to return for three years, exiled on the outside of a zone 50-miles wide. In the interim they travel the world - carpenters by trade. They help build houses, working with the locals, making friends and learning the slang, then, off again, on the next.

They seem happy, naturally happy, and I imagine all of the adventures and ups and downs they must have encountered along the way. They are not tourists they sya; Australia is not Ayers Rock and the Opera House. Australia is the people, the in-betweens. The world is the journey.

a Polaroid in reverse

The whores outside are hustling next to gutters and neon lights; shimmering orange outlines of full-length fishnet. On a quiet night the strip still vibrates softly, firing pulses along it's cables, voices through the exchange. The working girls are steady in the midst of intermittent surges, columns hardly faltering as waves after wave attempts to tear them down - wreck upon fear and leave the whole jetty of the Cross ruined, the remnants jetsam on the tide.

The view from my shop window is a living landscape, the strangest of Dali. It's not the worst of humanity though - not by a long shot. At least the people here have decided to jump into the fire. As I write that down a thought echoes through my head like giggles from the back of theatre; maybe they didn't decide. Maybe they were pushed. Would someone choose this life if they truly believed there was an alternative? I look through the window into the cauldron outside:

A slight insinuation of my reflection is drowned in the lightly transparent layers of scenes that melt into each other before my eyes. Is there beauty to be found here? A tour bus filled with fresh tourists gawking at the mess passes along the street - the vehicle exploding for a second in a vibrant pink mist, streaks of pure-white lightning wobbling against the windshield. The flare lights up a stairwell, and a girl's face is snapped for an instant in a grim tableau, bleached hair framed with a glow that hits her form and strikes the bags under her eyes and sunken jaw, a Polaroid in reverse. Just for a second.

There is beauty here, in all this strange and misery.

Autumn Leaf

Through Paul's office window, cutting through a wedge of sunlight that dances on dots of smog, an autumn leaf, crumpled and free, proudly swims against the wind's tide - the end of a life.

It's remarkable and wonderful and sad how much I feel like that leaf; the sun kissing my dessicated edges, helpless and brown as I fall while gravity gently mocks me.

Sinking - not drowning - in life, seasons merge as dreams, and the breaths of love drift like whispers through my tree. I am this way and that, swaying deliriously with passion; falling in love, at first deeply with night - until - she abandons me and now; I find happiness with day...

As I watch the autumn leaf descend I think; maybe somebody will take some joy from my flight - admire my grace as I tumble and spin in the morning air, awake and aware of the caress that awaits;

The earth, the cool, damp earth, beckoning me back to the fold with open arms - Home again.

Just a Thought

The thought flashed into my mind as I watched a B-grade movie on cable. Thoughts do that - as much as we can deny the idea of them popping into our heads out of nothing; they often do.

The thought that flashed and quivered in my mind was; if we - humans - imbue symbols with meaning, that is, when I write in 'English' what I'm actually doing is notating symbols that I have assigned meaning to, if we divine meaning from pictures and symbols and form - could everything we experience in this life be mere words in a book that only reveals it's true meaning at the end?

Could each image and sound and feeling and taste and smell and ... could all of this be another paragraph in a Bible that you and I will only fully appreciate at the moment just before death?

Just a thought.

Back to cable...